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LAST DAYS 



OF 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



This edition, printed on hand-made linen 
paper, is limited to 48^ numbered copies. 

No...i^/d, 



LAST DAYS 



OF 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



^n 3^istorical ^Jtetrij* 



By lord RONALD GOWER. 



fo7^ 




BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1886. 



" Shipwreck'd upon a kingdom, where no pity, 
No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me — 
Almost no grave allowed me; like the lily, 
That once was mistress of the field and flourished, 
I '11 hang my head and perish." 






<>"Gc 




PREFACE. 



7i>/ 



" I ""HERE is nothing new relating to the last 
days of Marie Antoinette in the fol- 
lowing sketch. At one time I had intended 
writing the whole story of her life; but this 
I have relinquished. 

The Queen's life becomes chiefly interest- 
ing as it approaches its end, and is chiefly 
remarkable by showing how a woman, whose 



VI PREFACE. 

early years were trifled thoughtlessly away, 
and who in later life — most unfortunately for 
her family, herself, and her adopted country — 
mixed herself in politics, where women are 
ever mischievous, was raised through suffer- 
ing to an heroic level. 

As the clouds of adversity gathered around, 
Marie Antoinette displayed a patience and 
a courage in unparalleled sufferings such as 
few saints and martyrs have equalled. 

The pure ore of her nature was but hid- 
den under the dross of worldliness : and the 
scorching fire of suffering revealed one of 
the tenderest hearts and one of the bravest 
natures that history records. To this is 
owing, I believe, the universal interest felt 
in her life and in her misfortunes. 



PREFACE. vii 

Among a crowd of others, my authorities 
for the following pages have been Campar- 
don's " Marie Antoinette a la Conciergerie " 
and Saint Amand's work on the same sub- 
ject. 



LAST DAYS 



OF 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



/^N the 2d of August, 1793, the widow 
of Louis XVI., Queen of France and 
Navarre, and Archduchess of Austria, the 
once brilliant sovereign of Versailles, now a 
prisoner, torn from her children and treated 
like a common felon, was removed from the 
prison of the Temple to that of the Concier- 
gerie, there to linger until her release from 
human barbarity on the i6th of October. 



lO LAST DA YS OF 

I propose writing an account of those last 
seventy-six days of a life once so bright, now 
brought to the lowest depth of moral and 
physical suffering. 

The Conciergerie is one of the most curious 
and interesting monuments of ancient Paris. 
A fortress in the days of Eude, Count of Paris, 
who here defied the Normans, it was enlarged 
by Robert the Pious, and from his time to 
that of Charles the Wise was the principal 
dwelling-place of the French kings. Later 
occupied by the Parliament, it became trans- 
formed into a State prison, although a portion 
of the building was still reserved for the use 
of the Parliament, the State Exchequer, and 
other judiciary bodies. 

Its splendid groined stone hall, recently 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. II 

restored, dates from the reign of St. Louis, 
as does also the adjoining Sainte Chapelle, 
one of the gems of mediaeval ecclesiastical 
architecture, which in our days almost mira- 
culously escaped uninjured the petroleum-fed 
flames of the Commune, which destroyed a 
portion of the prison. 

In one of the vast halls of this building, 
when occupied by the Parliament, Louis XIV. 
entered during a sitting, booted and spurred, 
and declared that he was the State; and in 
this same hall, in 1793, on the loth of March, 
the Revolutionary Tribunal held its first sit- 
ting. It was a strange fate that this building, 
once the dwelling-place of the sovereigns of 
the House of Capet, when holding their state 
in the capital, should see a captive within 



12 LAST DAYS OF 

its walls the widow of their descendant, — the 
" widow Capet," as the Jacobins described her 
in their blood-stained edicts. 

One can form no idea by seeing the Con- 
ciergerie — even that portion of it where pris- 
oners are still kept — in its present trim and 
well-kept state, of the appearance of the build- 
ing during the Revolution. 

Beugnot has given us his experiences of it 
in his Memoirs. " The staircases," he writes, 
" of the palace (prison) were crowded with 
women, who appear to be waiting there for 
some attractive show. The show was always 
ready at hand in the cart that waited to 
carry away the unfortunate victims to the 
guillotine. When I arrived, all these people 
rose together as in an amphitheatre, yelling 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 3 

with savage delight, showing the most fiend- 
ish joy at every fresh arrival. In that short 
space which I had to pass in order to enter 
the prison, I received such a welcome that 
I could judge of the reception that awaited 
me when I should have to leave." 

Beugnot thus describes what a night passed 
in the Conciergerie was like, and one may 
believe him when he says that those who 
have not passed through such an ordeal can- 
not know its terror. 

" From hour to hour the chimes beat slowly 
out these long hours of suffering ; the watch- 
dogs respond with long-drawn-out howls ; 
the jailers charged with the different death- 
warrants {actes (T accusatiofi) take these from 
cell to cell till far into the night, and awake 



14 LAST DAYS OF 

every prisoner by their menacing and insult- 
ing voices. Every one believes that his last 
hour has arrived; thus these death-sentences, 
destined for from sixty to eighty people daily, 
are so distributed that six hundred are kept 
in perpetual alarm." 

Another writer, M. de Beaulieu, has also 
written of his experiences in this prison. 

He says that when the river rises, the lower 
portion of the prison gets flooded, and that 
the whole place soaks with damp. The water 
runs down the walls ; the air is almost un- 
breathable, so tainted is it with the horrible 
emanations that come from the miserable 
crowds of prisoners huddled together. " It 
seemed," he adds, " as if the most pestilen- 
tial of all the prisons had been purposely 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 15 

selected for that of the Queen." To such 
a place and to such a situation had been 
brought one who formerly reigned at Ver- 
sailles, at Fontainebleau, at Compiegne and 
St. Cloud. 

But as Marie Antoinette enters this dismal 
place, and till she leaves it for the scaffold, 
she is, " although unqueened, yet like a queen 
and daughter to a king." 

Her appearance at this time one can 
gather from the portrait by Kocharsko, of 
which there are several repetitions. The origi- 
nal I believe to be the one in the collec- 
tion of the Prince d'Aremberg at Brussels. A 
photograph of this portrait appears at the 
commencement of these notes. 

The face is still " majestic though in ruin," 



1 6 LAST DAYS OF 

and shows the almost haughty mien which 
never quite left the daughter of the Caesars ; 
the proud arch of the eyebrow, the aquiline 
nose, and the marked prominence of the lower 
lip, that conspicuous feature in all the House 
of Hapsburg. Over her fast whitening hair 
the Queen wears the common widow's cap 
of that day, what we call a mob-cap, with its 
black ribbon tied in a loose knot below the 
kerchief, which, kept by a single pin, crosses 
her chest and shoulders. There is no more 
pathetic portrait than this. 

The Polish artist may have made a sketch 
for this likeness while — as he is tradition- 
ally said to have been — employed about the 
Queen as one of the gendarmes set to watch 
her ; but, as the evidence in Michonis' case 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 7 

proves, an artist was introduced into the 
Queen's prison. At any rate, it was painted 
by one who had opportunity of not only 
studying the Queen's features, but of por- 
traying her expression, — features and ex- 
pression which neither imprisonment nor 
suffering could degrade or alter. 

On the I St of August the Convention regis- 
tered an order that " Marie Antoinette be sent 
to the Revolutionary Tribunal. She will be im- 
mediately transferred to the Conciergerie." 

On the night following, or rather in the 
early morning of the following day, the Queen, 
who was still with her dauditer Madame 
Royale, and her sister-in-law Madam. e Eliza- 
beth, in the Temple, was awoke by the com- 
missioners at two in the morning. 



LAST DAYS OF 



In her short account of the days of her im- 
prisonment Madame Royale writes as follows : 
" My mother listened to the reading of the 
order for her removal without saying one 
word, nor did she display any emotion. My 
aunt and I begged to be allowed to accom- 
pany her, but were refused this privilege. 
While she made up a packet of her clothes, 
the municipal guards kept close beside her, nor 
would allow her- even to change her dress 
in private. They ordered her to empty out 
her pockets, searched her, and took away all 
that she had in them, although there was 
nothing of any consequence to take. They 
made a parcel of the things they found, 
which they said would be sent to the Re- 
volutionary Tribunal." 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 19 

What they took from the Queen was a 
small packet in which were some of her hus- 
band's and children's hair, a little register 
on which she taught her son arithmetic, a 
pocket-book in which she had written the 
address of her children's doctor, miniatures of 
Madame de Lamballe and two old friends 
of her youth, the Princesses of Hesse and 
of Mecklenburg, and two printed prayers. 
These commissioners were good enough to 
allow the Queen to keep her handkerchief, 
and also her smelling-bottle. After taking 
a tender farewell of her daughter, and tell- 
ing her to regard Madame Elizabeth as a 
second mother, and after a few whispered 
words to the latter, the Queen tore herself 
from the room, " without again looking at 



20 LAST DAYS OF 

US," adds her daughter, " for fear of losing 
her self-control." 

At the foot of the staircase of the tower 
she had to wait while the municipal guards 
made out a proces-verbal of her discharge from 
the Temple. In going out, she struck her 
head against the upper part of the door, 
not seeing how low it was. On being asked 
if she had hurt herself, she answered, " No ; 
nothing can hurt me now." 

Madame Royale was not an authoress, 
but perhaps the very simplicity of her narra- 
tive, the uncoloured description of this scene, 
in which the long agony of the Queen may 
be said to commence, is more touching than 
had she written of it at greater length and 
with more effusion. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 21 

He who can read the daughter's account of 
this supreme parting and not feel touched at 
it, must have something very hard in the 
place where his heart should be. 

Outside the gate of the Temple a closed car- 
riage was waiting, which the Queen entered, 
accompanied by Michonis, one of the muni- 
cipals, and two gendarmes. It was three 
o'clock in the morning when the carriage 
drew up at the gate of the Queen's new 
prison. 

Within the Conciergerie the wife of the 
jailer, Richard, and her servant were sitting 
up, expecting the arrival of the Queen : Ma- 
dame Richard's, and especially Rosalie Lamor- 
liere's, names should be remembered, as from 
them the last acts of kindness and sympathy 



22 LAST DAYS OF 

were shown to one whom the whole world 
seemed to have deserted. 

During the first portion of her imprison- 
ment in the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette 
occupied a room called the Chamber of the 
Council, where, before the Revolution, the 
magistrates were wont to meet on certain 
days of the year to hear the complaints of 
the prisoners. This room had lately been 
tenanted by General de Custines. The 
Queen found a number of gendarmes drawn 
up at the door of her new prison, and within 
several of the Revolutionary Tribunal were 
gathered to see their new victim. The cere- 
mony of the prisoner's registration having 
been finished, these left, leaving the Queen 
alone with Madame Richard and Rosalie. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 23 

The latter has left a record of the Queen's 
imprisonment, which has been considered 
truthful by all those who have written on 
the subject. At first, says Rosalie, the Queen 
seemed surprised at the bareness of her new 
prison. She was suffering much from the 
heat, her face bathed with perspiration. 

After hanging up her watch on a nail in 
the wall, she commenced to take off her 
things. Rosalie, who offered to assist her, was 
thanked by the Queen, who said to her that 
since she had been in prison she was used to 
do for herself. Her manner, Rosalie adds, 
was completely simple and kind. 

Just outside the Queen's prison was a wine- 
shop, to which the prisoners flocked, shouting 
their ribald songs within a few feet of where 



24 LAST DA YS OF 

the Queen was obliged to sit during those 
long August days. She was in the worst quar- 
ter of the Conciergerie, where the lowest scum 
of the non-political prisoners are kept. She was 
not even allowed the dignity of solitude in her 
confinement, and was obliged to be within ear- 
shot of the profanities and obscenities of the 
lowest rabble in the world. Two gendarmes 
occupied a portion of the room, and an old 
woman of eighty was placed near her. She 
helped her to patch up her scanty wardrobe ; 
but she was soon replaced by another woman, 
named Harel, whom the Queen suspected of 
being a spy, and to whom, in consequence, 
she hardly ever spoke. The night of her 
arrival at the Conciergerie the Queen had 
not so much as a change of linen. For days 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 25 

she begged to be allowed some, but it was 
not until the tenth day that her prayer 
was granted, when Michonis went to the 
Temple and brought back with him a parcel 
of linen and some clothes ; among others, a 
white gown, which the Queen wore on the 
day of her execution. On seeing the care 
with which these clothes had been selected, 
the Queen said to Rosalie that she knew she 
owed them to " my poor sister Elizabeth." 

De Beaulieu, whom we have already quoted, 
writes thus : " Among the prisoners was a con- 
vict of the name of Barrasin, a most forbid- 
ding-looking fellow, who helped to make up 
the Queen's prison." Knowing this, Beaulieu 
inquired of him how the Queen was treated. 
" Like any one else," was the answer ; and on 



26 LAST DA YS OF 

his asking Barrasin how the Queen passed her 
time, " Oh, the Capet mends her stockings." 

" What sort of a bed has she got ? " 

" A straw mattress, Hke your own," said 
the convict. 

" How is she dressed ? " 

" She wears a black gown, which is all torn 
and in holes, and she looks in it like une 
Margotr 

Little by little everything was taken from the 
poor Queen. The souvenirs of her happy past 
life, to which she clung, being all that were left 
her of former days, were ruthlessly taken ; first 
her watch, a gift of her mother, and which 
had never left her since she left Vienna, — the 
watch which had counted the happy hours of 
her youth and womanhood was taken from 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 2*J 

her. She wept bitterly, Rosalie says, at having 
to part with it, as if it had been a friend. 

In the diary of Marie Antoinette's daughter, 
Madame Royale, she mentions that her mother 
was accustomed to drink only water, not that 
of the Seine, which made her ill, but from the 
Ville d'Avray. She had obtained it daily at 
the Temple, but it was not allowed her in the 
Conciergerie. 

The Queen sent to get her knitting {tricot) 
from the Temple, where she had been making 
a pair of socks for the Dauphin, or, as they 
called him now, Louis XVII. " We sent," 
writes the Princess, " everything we could find 
in the shape of cotton and worsted, knowing 
how fond my mother was of all kinds of work. 
Formerly she was always so engaged, except 



28 LAST DAYS OF 

when obliged to hold her court {aux keures 
de representation). She had worked an im- 
mense quantity of tapestry for furniture, and 
had even made a carpet." 

So she and Madame Elizabeth packed up 
all these things, fondly hoping they would be 
given the Queen. But she was not allowed 
any of them, " for fear," adds the Princess, 
" that she would injure herself with the 
needles." 

Unable to obtain her work-things and 
without any knitting-needles, Marie Antoinette, 
according to Rosalie, managed to pick out 
some threads from an old piece of wall covering, 
which oddly enough was ornamented with the 
royal badge of the fleur-de-lys, and with these 
threads and a pair of toothpicks for needles, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE, 29 

and resting the work on her knee as a work- 
frame, was enabled to make some garters. On 
arriving at the Conciergerie the Queen had 
but one cap, and this in daily use began to get 
shabby. Madame Richard was, however, able 
to get her another. " I have nothing worth 
giving her," she said one day to Rosalie, " but 
take this," giving Rosalie a piece of lawn that 
she found she could spare from one of those 
poor widow's head-dresses. 

One day, kindly intending, Madame Richard 
brought into the Queen's prison her youngest 
child, a chubby pretty boy of about eight years 
old, — the Dauphin's age. The Queen took him 
in her arms and burst into bitter tears. Her 
poor boy was never out of the Queen's mind 
night or day. Of all her many tortures, that 



30 LAST DA YS OF 

of knowing that he was ill-treated and in the 
wretch Simon's hands was the most fearful. 

More than one attempt had been made 
to induce the Queen to escape from the 
Temple ; but as long as the King, and, after 
the King's death, her children remained with 
her, she always refused to leave them. But 
now, alone, and with the shadow of the 
guillotine creeping ever nearer, the solitary 
Queen appears to have been willing to 
escape. A determined attempt was made at 
the beginning of September to get her out 
of the Conciergerie ; an attempt only resulting 
in failure. From a clove having been employed 
in this conspiracy, it is known as that of the 
clove-pink, — " La conspiration de I'oeillet." 
The following is a translation of the proces- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 31 

verbal, taken from M. Campardon's work, 
" Marie Antoinette a la Conciergerie : " — 

"No. I. — Report made by the Citizen Gil- 
bert, gendarme of the widow Capet. 
Dedicated to Citizen Demesnil, Lieu- 
tenant-Colonel of the Gendarmerie, 3d 
September, 1793. 

" In my difficult position, I should be 
wanting in my duty in not informing you 
of the risk run by introducing near the 
widow Capet suspicious people ; and in order 
that I and my companions should not be 
compromised, the following statement is the 
truth relating to this affair. The last time 
but one that the Citizen Michonis came, he 
brought with him an individual, at seeing 



32 LAST DAYS OF 

whom the widow Capet was visibly agitated. 
She declared him to be a ci-devant knight 
of St. Louis, and that she trembled lest he 
should be discovered. She also said that 
he had given her a pink containing a note, 
and that he would return on the following 
Friday. Also, that while the maid of the 
widow Capet was playing with me at cards, 
she pricked a note with a pin, which she 
bade me give to the knight of St. Louis. 
Not wishing to have to reproach myself or 
neglect my duties, I took it at once to the 
jailer, to whose wife I gave the paper, and 
made the same reports as here stated." 

On the strength of this denunciation the 
Queen underwent an examination by some 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 33 

members of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 
3d of September. This examination began 
with the following questions and replies : — 

Q. Are you the person who is called the 
widow Capet ? 

A. I am. 

Q. Do you see any one where you are 
placed ? 

A. Only those people who are placed 
about me, and the officials who have come 
with persons whom I do not know. 

Q. Have you not seen lately a ci-devant 
knight of St. Louis.? 

A. It is possible, so many persons come. 

Q. Do you not know the names of some 

of those who have come with the officials? 

3 



34 LAST DAYS OF 

A. I do not remember the names of any. 

Q. Among those who have come into your 
room, did you not recognise any one? 

A. No. 

Q. Did not some one recognise you lately ? 

A. I cannot remember. 

Q. Did not a man give you a pink } 

A. There are some of those flowers in my 
room. 

Q. Did you not receive a letter? 

A. How could I receive one with the 
people in the room, and the woman who 
always watches from the window? 

Q. Would it not have been possible to have 
given you a pink containing a letter? 

A. I doubt it, as the woman would have 
noticed it, and she said nothing. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 35 

Q. Have you not written anything lately? 
A. I have no materials for writing. 

And so on for many pages. But the fact 
was, the poor Queen had not only received a 
letter, but had also answered it by pricking 
some words with a pin or needle on a small 
strip of paper. She can hardly be blamed for 
denying a fact which, were it revealed — and she 
knew not of Gilbert's having denounced her — 
would not only condemn her, but the devoted 
man who had attempted her deliverance, and of 
whose safety she could not then have known. 

Although De Rougeville escaped the guillo- 
tine, he fell under the bullets of the Bonapart- 
ists in 1 8 14, having been convicted of another 
Legitimist plot. 



36 LAST BAYS OF 

Alexandre Dumas has, in one of his most 
stirring romances, celebrated De Rougeville's 
courage, but has changed that name to that 
of the Chevalier de la Maison Rouge. 

Towards the close of her examination, the 
Queen, who seems to have regained her 
lofty spirit, on being asked whether she was 
not interested in the success of the ene- 
my's armies, replied, " I interest myself in 
the success of those of my son's nation ; 
when one is a mother, that is the dearest 
interest." 

Being asked what was her son's nationality, 
she replied, " Can you doubt it ? Is he not 
French?" 

" Your son," they argued, " being only a 
private individual, has been obliged to relin- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 37 



quish all the vain prerogatives that formerly 
were attached to the title of kins:." 

" There is no prouder one," the Queen 
answered, " than that of desiring the happiness 
of France." 

" Then you are doubtless much pleased that 
neither kings nor royalty now exist." 

"All that we wish," she replied to this 
sneer, " is that France should be great and 
happy." 

When asked if she agreed with the opinions 
of her husband, she said with firmness, " Yes. 
I have always fulfilled my duty. If," she 
added, " France is to be happy with a king, 
then I desire it should be so with my son ; 
and I regard those mine enemies who wish 
evil to my children." 



38 LAST DA YS OF 

Interrogations followed. Marie Bault, who 
had waited on the Queen, denied that the 
stranger (De Rougeville) had offered a flower 
or spoken to the Queen; nor had she 
seen her write with a needle or otherwise. 
Michonis (the municipal guard) also underwent 
an examination; but little came of it. He was, 
however, imprisoned on suspicion, and on 
the 23d of May, 1794, executed with fifty-four 
others, including Cecile Renault, suspected of 
intending to assassinate Robespierre. An allu- 
sion is made to Michonis having introduced 
a painter into the Queen's presence; this was 
doubtless Kocharsko, whose portrait of the 
Queen has been already referred to. Gilbert, 
the gendarme who had betrayed the unfor- 
tunate confidence the Queen had placed in 



m 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



39 



him, gave evidence to the same effect as 
that in his letter. He added to this the 
extraordinary statement, which he asserted 
the Queen had made him, that she not only 
showed him the answer to De Rousfeville's 
note, but the paper on which she had 
pricked the answer. " You see," he said the 
Queen remarked, " I can write without a 
pen ! " Always imprudent, the unfortunate 
Queen seems to have quite forgotten the 
extreme peril of taking such a man as 
this gendarme appears to have been into 
her confidence ; she suffered terribly for 
this, as she had done for all her other 
imprudences. Others were examined, but 
nothing could be proved as long as the 
principal agent, De Rougeville, was at liberty. 



40 LAST DAYS OF 

and, fortunately for him, he managed to 
elude all pursuit. Whether or not it was 
owing to being aware of this, on her second 
examination by the commissioners the Queen 
acknowledged having received a letter. On 
being asked what that note contained, she 
said, " Only a few vague sentences. ' What 
do you intend doing ? I have escaped from 
prison miraculously. I will come on Friday.'" 
There was also an offer of money in it, 
and she added that she had no intention 
of accepting any. On being pressed to tell 
what she had written on the slip of paper 
with the needle, she said, " I tried to mark, 
' I am closely watched. I do not speak or 
write.' " On being shown the paper, she 
recognised it. They asked what had passed 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 4 1 

between her and De Rougeville. " He asked 
me," she replied, " if my heart failed me ; 
and I said, ' It never fails me, but it is pro- 
foundly afflicted.' " In an interesting little 
book by the Comte de Reiset, " Lettres 
inedites de Marie Antoinette," a reproduc- 
tion of the Queen's needle-pricked note is 
given. It reads thus : " Je me fie a vous, 
je viendrai," after the line to which she 
confessed having written to the commis- 
sioners. 

How and in what manner De Rougeville 
intended releasing the Queen from the Con- 
ciergerie will never be known. There are 
various suppositions, — one, the least improba- 
ble, being that, having gained over Michonis 
and the gendarmes, he would be enabled, by 



42 LAST DAYS OF 

a forged order from the Municipality instruct- 
ing Michonis to take the Queen back to 
the Temple, to put her in a carriage, in 
which, protected by a mounted body of 
Royalists, they would make their way to the 
frontier. 

Alluding to this attempt, Madame Royale 
writes, in her account of her family's imprison- 
ment, that she had learnt since the death 
of the Queen that attempts had been made 
to get her out of the Conciergerie. " I 
have been assured," writes the Princess, 
"that the gendarmes who watched her and 
the wife of the doorkeeper had been gained 
over by some of our friends ; that she had 
seen several people devoted to her in her 
prison, amongst others a priest, who had 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 43 

administered the sacraments to her, which 
she had received with deep piety. The 
chance of escape was missed on one occa- 
sion, as she had been told to speak to the 
second guard, and by mistake she spoke 
to the first. Another time, she had got 
out of the room, and had already passed 
through the corridor, when she was stopped 
by a gendarme, and obliged to return to 
her room, although he had been gained 
over. A great many persons were interested 
in my mother's fate ; and indeed, except the 
vilest, of whom also there were many, it 
was impossible to be with her for however 
short a time without being filled for her 
with respect, so much goodness was mixed 
with the dignity of her manner. At the 



44 LAST DA YS OF 

time these things happened we knew no 
details, but we only heard that my mother 
had seen a knight of St. Louis, who had 
given her a pink which contained a note." 

In the Baron de Klinckowstoem's work, 
" Le Comte de Fersen et la Cour de France," 
this affair is told as follows : — 

De Rougeville knew Madame Dutilleul, an 
American (this must be an error on Fersen's 
part, as Madame Dutilleul's maiden name was 
Sophie Lebon, a native of Paris), and they 
formed a project to save the Queen. They 
gained over Fontanis, an honest man, a timber 
merchant, and Michonis. Michonis would not 
accept any money, but paid the others. One 
day De Rougeville accompanied Michonis to 
the prison. The Queen rose and said, " Oh, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 45 

it is you, Monsieur Michonis," and on seeing 
M. de Rougeville became greatly agitated, 
and almost fainted, which surprised the gen- 
darmes. He made a sign to her to reassure 
herself, and told her to take some pinks, 
where a letter was concealed. She did not 
dare to do so, and he dropt them. The 
Queen then sent for Michonis, and while 
he spoke to the gendarmes, she said to De 
Rougeville that he was running too much 
risk, and he said that she should be saved, 
and that he would bring her money to gain 
over the gendarmes. She then said to him, 
" If I appear weak and broken, this," placing 
her hand on her heart, "is not so." She 
asked him whether her trial would soon come 
on. He reassured her. She said to him, " Look 



46 LAST DA YS OF 

at me and at my bed, and tell my relations 
and my friends, if you can escape, the con- 
dition you have seen me in." They then left. 
The doorkeeper and his wife had been gained. 
The plan was that Michonis, who had brought 
the Queen from the Temple to the Conciergerie, 
should go at night at ten o'clock, and remove 
the Queen by order of the Municipality to the 
Temple, as it were, and thus get her away. 
But one of the gendarmes, who apparently 
had not been gained, opposed her, and pre- 
vented the Queen from leaving the prison. 
And so ended this disastrous attempt. Its 
only consequence was to hasten her trial, and 
to enhance the horrors of her confinement by 
removing her to a far worse dungeon than 
the prison in which she had passed the first 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 47 

month of her imprisonment. All, even the 
devotion of her friends, seemed but to con- 
spire to add greater sufferings to the unfor- 
tunate Queen. 

On the nth of September, Marie Antoi- 
nette was transferred from the prison-room she 
had occupied since the 2d of August into 
the dark and narrow underground cell still 
shown to visitors interested in her tragic life. 
But there have been many alterations made 
there since the days of the Terror. 

Passing through the courtyard of the Con- 
ciergerie, a vast hall is entered, lately restored ; 
this the body-guard of St. Louis are said to 
have occupied. At the end of this vaulted 
hall, on the left, some steps are descended ; 
turning to the right, a dark passage is 



48 LAST DA YS OF 

reached ; at the end of this, on the left, is the 
room occupied by the gendarmes during the 
imprisonment of the Queen — now transformed 
into a bathroom for the use of prisoners — and 
next to it is the Queen's prison. The opening 
between these two rooms has been closed. 
A heavily barred door, by which the Queen's 
prison is now entered, is not in its original 
position, as it formerly was in the room of 
the gendarmes ; now, as has already been said, 
it is in the prison bathroom. 

Formerly there was no ingress to the 
Queen's cell but through this room, the 
doorway, where it now is, having been walled 
up. The window has also been altered, 
having been enlarged in the reign of Louis 
XVIII. The pictures, mere daubs, that now 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 49 

hang on the prison-wall, one representing 
the separation of the Royal Family on the 
eve of the King's execution, the other the 
Queen taking the sacrament in prison — an 
occurrence which probably did not take place 
— date also from that reign. The crucifix is 
said to have belonged to the Queen ; but 
this, too, is improbable, as, had she pos- 
sessed one, it would have undoubtedly been 
taken from her. This is placed on the wall 
above a tablet and an altar ; these also date 
from the Restoration. The only portions of 
this cell that exist now as when the Queen 
was confined in it are the bricks with which 
the floor is tiled, the ceiling, and the walls. 

The opening communicating with the ad- 
joining prison, in which Robespierre is sup- 

4 



50 LAST DAYS OF 

posed to have passed a few hours before his 
execution, has also been made since th©', time 
of the Queen's imprisonment ; it is now used 
as the Sacristy of the Chapel. A large vaulted 
chamber beyond, famous as being the room 
in which the Girondins passed their last night 
together, is now the Chapel, and Mass is 
celebrated weekly here before the prisoners. 

Nothing much more gloomy or wretched 
than this new place of captivity into which 
the Queen was placed can well be imagined ; 
but in order to render it still more so, the 
Queen's jailers had the heavily barred win- 
dow, by which some light struggled into the 
cell from the courtyard outside, where the 
female prisoners came to wash their linen, 
covered half way up with a screen of sheet 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 5 1 

iron, and the upper portion wired over. The 
prison measured seven feet in depth by six- 
teen in length ; but the Queen was only- 
allowed a portion of this space. The furni- 
ture of the prison consisted of a little truckle- 
bed, a washhand basin, a caned chair, a little 
wooden table, with a stool of coarse woollen 
work, and two of the chairs used in the prison. 
This, and a paper box in which the Queen 
kept her dresses, her caps, her kerchiefs, 
and her linen, was all that the little maid 
could procure for her ; but that little was 
as gratefully received by the prisoner as if 
it had been of much value. Up to this 
time the Queen appears still to have had 
some faint hopes of her life being spared, 
probably as that of a hostage ; and accord- 



52 LAST DAYS OF 

ing to Rosalie Lamorliere, she had said to 
her that if she were to leave the Conciergerie, 
she would take her with her as her maid. 

But after the affair of the pink and the 
change to so infinitely worse a prison, and 
the rigorous watch now set over her, Marie 
Antoinette's heart must have failed within her 
as far as any earthly hope was concerned; 
but her unshakeable courage, as she had 
said to De Rougeville, never failed ; and al- 
though the accumulated sufferings and priva- 
tions that were now added to her mental 
tortures daily increased, she never showed 
anything but a patience that, if it had not 
been supported by something unearthly, would 
be unaccountable. 

It must not be lost sight of that the Queen 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 53 

was naturally of an imperious and somewhat 
easily roused temper, and this was one of 
the many causes that made her unpopular 
even in her bright days, although no one 
was sooner appeased, or more anxious to 
atone for any hasty word that might have 
fallen from her. The Prince de Ligne, in an 
unpublished account of the Queen, gives the 
following little anecdote to prove this trait in 
her character. 

One day, wanting some article of dress or 
toilette, she rang for her attendants, and on 
their not being able to find what the Queen 
wanted, she said pettishly, " How terrible it is 
not to be able to find what one wants I " And 
on the Prince de Ligne remarking that she 
seemed much annoyed about such a trifle and 



54 LAST DA YS OF 

angry at so small a cause, she summoned 
her maids, and on their appearance said, in 
order to make up for her former petulance, 
" You see how well I am served ; they have 
all come together;" much to the delight of 
them all. 

A trifling incident, but it shows the char- 
acter of Marie Antoinette, and it is therefore 
worth recording. But now, in these last 
days of her life, when surrounded by every 
aggravation that could wound a proud spirit, 
treated like the worst of offenders, insulted 
as mother, wife, queen, and woman, she never 
seems to have as much as said one word 
that could be construed into petulance, or 
given one angry look. 

As her sufferings increased, so did her 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 55 

patience ; and if she had committed impru- 
dences and faults, these were a thousand-fold 
atoned for by a constancy in trial that is not 
easy to match out of Divine Writ. 

For the details of her last days on earth, one 
is obliged to trust the accounts left us by her 
jailers or their relatives. What seems to me 
somewhat suspicious in these memoirs is that 
they are far too well composed to have been 
written by those whose names they bear. 
Doubtless Rosalie Lamorliere and Madame 
Bault were kind-hearted and sympathetic crea- 
tures, but it is scarcely probable that they 
should have written high-flowing accounts of 
their prisoner, compared to which the diary of 
the Queen's daughter's imprisonment by herself 
reads as the writing of a schoolgirl, but is all 



56 LAST DA YS OF 

the more to be trusted for its very simplicity. 
Probably, as has often happened with the 
memoirs of Rosalie and the others relating 
to the Queen's last days, some author of the 
day got hold of the rough account written 
by them of the Queen's imprisonment, or 
got the details by word of mouth, and then 
polishing the account, gave it its present 
shape. The wife of the new jailer that 
guarded the Queen in her new prison — Dame 
Bault — has left an account of these days, 
named " Recit exact des derniers moments de 
la captivite de la Reine, depuis la ii Sep- 
tembre 1793 jusqu'au 16 Octobre. By the 
Dame Bault, widow of her last porter." 

But whether this memoir is strictly accu- 
rate or not, it is the only one that gives any 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 57 

details of the last days of the Queen's life, and 
has been trusted as an authority by all the 
French authors who have written of that time. 
Bault — or Le Beau, as Rosalie writes it — the 
Queen's new jailer, was informed by the Tri- 
bunal that his head would be forfeited if the 
Queen escaped; so it is not to be wondered 
at that, although he seems to have sympa- 
thised with the captive, his watch over her 
was a rigorous one. No more flowers, of which 
the Queen was always passionately fond, were 
now allowed to be introduced into her cell — 
flowers, that, of all the beautiful things of Na- 
ture, had alone given a little charm and solace 
to the prisoner. Even her rings were taken 
from her — her wedding-ring and two set with 
diamonds, which Rosalie observed she used to 



58 LAST DAYS OF 

change from one hand to the other — those 
hands still so white and beautiful. Marie An- 
toinette, who, even when at Versailles, hated 
having nothing to occupy herself with, and dis- 
liked the tedious court ceremonies for debar- 
ring her from her music, her books, and her 
embroidery, was now reduced to work a kind 
of garter with threads taken from her bedding, 
and not being allowed any knitting-needles, 
used a pair of toothpicks. When finished, the 
Queen dropped this garter with a significant 
look when Bault entered the prison. It reached 
— thanks to one of her loyalest followers, Mons. 
Hue, a faithful servant of Louis XVI. — its des- 
tination, for he gave it to the Queen's daughter 
when he accompanied her to Vienna two years 
later. The Queen had not been so fortunate 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 59 

with another Httle rehc that she hoped her child 
would receive. This consisted of a pair of gloves 
and a lock of her hair, which she had slipped 
into Bault's hand ; but the action was observed 
by one of the gendarmes, and the little parcel 
was confiscated. 

There was not a moment that the Queen 
could be out of sight of her gendarmes ; a little 
screen four feet high was the only separation 
between the space in which she changed her 
dress and those men. Imagine the misery of 
this state for a woman so delicately nurtured, 
so luxuriously brought up, accustomed not 
only to the most refined manner of life, but 
to that of a court which had never been, and 
never can be, exceeded in all that tended 
to make existence — if mere external respect 



6o LAST DAYS OF 

and deference can promote happiness — a living 
pageant and a realised dream. Imagine this 
change for a woman not only accustomed 
to soft living, but for nearly twenty years 
treated as half divine, having a house- 
hold of over four hundred persons at her 
command, and who, although she always 
seemed to love to leave the glare and splen- 
dour and pomp of representation for the quiet 
of her own friends, and seemed only really 
happy with them and her children, yet could 
dazzle those accustomed to the greatest courts 
by the magnificence of her state, and win the 
admiration and homage of foreigners, who, 
prepared to criticise, were carried away by so 
much beauty, grace, and charm. 

Alas! she whom Edmund Burke had seen 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 6 1 

" glittering like the morning star, full of life and 
splendour and joy," was hurled low indeed. 
But to me Marie Antoinette is a far nobler 
figure as I can see her in her last prison, with 
her widow's cap over her almost white hair, 
her frayed and patched black gown, and the 
wretched truckle-bed that stands against the 
damp stone wall of her prison, than when 
in the heyday of her youth and beauty at 
Versailles, the cynosure of all that is highest 
and gayest in that huge palace, or when 
playing the part of the miller's wife in her court 
gardens at Trianon. Then she was but a 
brilliant queen and attractive woman, with 
most of the faults of her sex; but at the 
Conciergerie she may claim in history to hold 
a place with the noblest of human kind that 



62 LAST DA YS OF 

have gone through great trials with added lustre 
to their names, — of those who have attained a 
more excellent renown, and who have come out 
of " great tribulation " with the stains of their 
poor humanities and weaknesses washed for 
ever away. 

Rosalie, the faithful maid, was still in at- 
tendance on the Queen, although Michonis, 
owing to the conspiracy of the pink, had been 
removed. Bault, the new jailer, appears to 
have been a well-meaning man, touched with 
the sorrows of the august victim he had in 
charge, but not daring to show his feelings. 
He appears to have been distressed when, 
on offering to do up the Queen's hair for 
her, she gave him one of her majestic looks, 
and said she would prefer doing that herself. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 63 

Formerly a matter of immense time and trouble, 
the Queen's hair was now soon arranged. She 
divided it in the middle and raised it on 
the sides, and probably — thanks to Rosalie — 
had some perfumed powder, which she would 
sprinkle on it whenever aware that she would 
have to appear before her judges and the pub- 
lic. The poor woman, with a last sad touch 
of the wish to please, which never left her 
even in the last bitter days, would take extra 
pains to appear as becoming as her poor 
means could afford. 

Bault managed to arrange that the Queen 
should have better food than the ordinary 
of the prisoners, as had been ordered by the 
judges. He said that, being responsible for 
the life of the Queen, he would take charge 



64 LAST DA YS OF 

of all the viands that entered her cell. By this 
means he could occasionally procure her such 
little luxuries as Madame Bault could cater 
for in the markets, where she was known to 
some of the market-women ; and it is not a 
little touching to hear that these good souls" 
would keep their best chicken and ripest fruits, 
thrusting a peach or a melon into her willing 
hands, with " Take it for our good Queen," 
as they called her; and would smuggle them 
into the basket of Dame Bault, with the tears 
in their eyes. I never pass a Paris market, 
and see the good-natured-looking "ladies of 
the hall," as I believe they still call them- 
selves, without recalling the good feeling that 
some of their class showed to the poor Queen 
when even to allude to her with sympathy 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 65 

might bring them to the scaffold. Rosalie, 
who still waited on her mistress, brought in 
her dinner, which consisted of some soup and 
chicken or veal on alternate days, with a dish 
of vegetables. The plates and dishes were 
of pewter. Formerly the Queen only drank 
water. Rosalie mentions that once crossing 
the prison-yard with a half-emptied glass of 
water, she was accosted by a M. De Saint 
Leger, also a prisoner, and, as it seems, a 
devoted Royalist ; for, hearing that the Queen 
had drank out of the glass, he took off his 
hat and drank the remainder. Very French 
and very pretty, and one hopes that the Queen 
may have heard of it from Rosalie. On another 
occasion, while Rosalie was brushing a pair 
of the Queen's shoes, some of the imprisoned 

5 



66 LAST DA YS OF 

Royalists, who were looking through the bars 
which separated them from the courtyard, 
asked her to come near them in order that 
they might touch the Queen's shoes. They not 
only did so, but kissed them with deep respect 
as they passed them from one to the other. 
There was indeed no loyalty lacking here in 
the Conciergerie, but it came too late. 

The damp of the Queen's underground 
prison was such that her black gown began to 
fall into rags. She had another one, a white 
one, but this she only wore during her trial and 
on the day of her death. Rosalie patched up 
the decaying dress as well as she could, and 
the pieces that had fallen from it she gave 
to some who asked for them as relics of the 
prisoner. The few other clothes were in a 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 67 

deplorable state and required constant repair. 
The Queen was only permitted three shirts, 
one ornamented with lace ; but the Revolu- 
tionary Tribunal decided that but one of 
these should be given the Queen, and worn 
ten days before another was allowed her ; even 
her handkerchiefs were only allowed one by 
one, and a strict account was kept of every 
article as it came from, or entered the prison. 

The Queen herself kept a list of her linen, 
marking it down with a pin on the wall. Ro- 
salie adds that she had also scratched some 
other things on the wall ; but after her death 
these were all painted over with a thick coat of 
whitewash. 

Not being allowed a chest of drawers, she 
placed her clothes in a paper box that Rosalie 



68 LAST DA YS OF 

brought her, which she received, says Rosalie, 
as if it had been the most beautiful piece of 
furniture in the world. 

Rosalie also procured her a little looking- 
glass, which she had bought for twenty- 
five sous on the Quays, a little hand-glass 
bordered with red, with little Chinese figures 
painted on the sides. This too seemed much 
to please the Queen; and doubtless it gave 
her more satisfaction than had done all the 
miles of mirrors at Versailles. 

With the month of October the cold 
weather had set in, and the Queen's suf- 
ferings were aggravated by this new trial, 
against which, as the cell had no means 
of being warmed, there was no remedy. 
The only thing Rosalie could do was to 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 69 

take the Queen's night-dress, and, after warm- 
ing it, bring it back to the prisoner ere 
she went to what rest she could obtain in 
her wretched cell. No light was allowed 
her, only the dim reflection of an oil-lamp 
that flickered in the yard outside the grated 
window. 

In spite of all the precautions that had 
been taken by her jailers to make escape 
impossible, the Queen was constantly intruded 
on by these men, at night as well as during 
the day. One day they scolded Bault for 
having placed by the side of the bed against 
the wall a piece of old tapestry that pro- 
tected the bed from the dank stones ; they 
wished it removed, and it was only by 
Bault's presence of mind in telling them 



70 LAST DAYS OF 

that he had placed the tapestry there in 
order that any sound from the adjoining cell 
should be deadened that they allowed it to 
remain. 

The Queen having asked for a cover- 
ing of cotton stuff, Bault took this message 
to Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, 
who demanded savagely how he dared 
prefer such a request, and, foaming with 
rage, told Bault that he deserved to be 
guillotined. 

Some Sisters of Mercy — and never did they 
better deserve that blessed name — were, how- 
ever, able to send the Queen some thick 
woollen stockings. 

No wonder that among such miseries the 
Queen's health gave way. The cold and 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 71 

damp of the prison brought on severe rheu- 
matism, and her eyesight, never strong, be- 
came seriously affected ; one of her eyes, in 
fact, appears to have been destroyed ; and 
there is Httle doubt that had the trial and 
condemnation been postponed for a few more 
weeks, the unspeakable sufferings of Marie 
Antoinette would have closed within the walls 
of the Conciergerie. 

Bault's widow bears testimony, in her me- 
moir, to the wondrous endurance of the Queen. 
She writes : — "I have seen the model of 
resignation the most religious and of con- 
stancy the most heroic, and it must not be 
lost sight of that the Queen of France was 
doomed to drink to the very dregs the bitter 
cup of sorrow ; and my everlasting regret will 



72 LAST DAYS OF 

be to have been unable to do more to assuage 
her sufferings." Very noble sentiments, but 
hardly the expression one would expect from 
the wife of a jailer. 

Through the Baults the Queen occasion- 
ally had news of her family in the Temple ; 
but there could be no alleviation for the poor 
mother if she were told how it fared with her 
beloved son. 

One alleviation — the greatest for a captive 
after the consciousness of being innocent of 
crimes for which he suffers wrongfully — that 
of reading, the Queen obtained through the 
attention of her jailer, who got her a few 
books ; but we are only told the name of 
one, and that was a translation of our 
Captain Cook's travels. Anything that could 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 73 

have taken her mind off, even for a few 
moments, the sufferings she endured must 
have been an immense solace, and the stirring 
adventures of Cook may have done this for 
her. 

One day the Queen called Rosalie's atten- 
tion to the upper windows of an adjoining house 
occupied by some religious order, and to the 
figure of a sister praying. " Look how fer- 
vently she prays," said the Queen ; and, as 
M. De Saint Amand says in his interesting 
book, " La Derniere Annee de Marie Antoi- 
nette," " She may well be supposed to have 
been praying for the captive at her feet." 

Early in October the Conciergerie — ever 
emptying its prisoners for the guillotine and 
receiving fresh batches — witnessed the arrival 



74 LAST DA YS OF 

of some with whom the Queen's history is 
closely connected. The first of these was 
the Duke of Orleans, the implacable enemy of 
Marie Antoinette, whose courage on the way 
to death was the only respectable thing in 
his life ; the other, the ill-starred, mischievous, 
but, on the whole, well-intentioned party of 
men known as the Girondins, who soon ex- 
perienced the effect of destroying an old 
form of constitution without having given 
time to a new one to be formed, — were 
now under the same roof as the Queen, and 
within a few hours shared the same fate. 
One of these, Valaze — who disappointed the 
guillotine by killing himself in prison — wrote to 
his wife on the 7th of October. In his letter 
he says the thing of all others that most 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 75 

impresses him, and to which he cannot get 
used, is that he is so near the widow Capet, 
and that the same bolts and bars confine 
them ; " as if," he says, " to show, as it were, 
by this neighbourhood a sort of compHcity 
between them. This of all things is perhaps 
the most extraordinary in my destiny." 

As early as the ist of August, Barere 
had from the Tribune of the Convention 
clamoured that the Queen should appear 
before the Revolutionary Tribunal ; but what 
made this difficult was that the case against 
the Queen was not such as could ensure 
her condemnation, and every means was put 
into practice to get evidence against her. 
At length a diabolical idea occurred to 
Hebert, — no other than, by bringing a revolt- 



76 LAST DAYS OF 

ing charge against Marie Antoinette, to 
destroy any sympathy that might still be 
felt for her among the public, and thus more 
easily to condemn her in the face of the 
world. But the monstrous charge served only 
to prove the utter depravity of the then 
rulers of France, and enabled the Queen, in 
a moment and for ever, to vindicate herself, 
and not herself only, but humanity at large, 
against a calumny that seemed to breathe of 
the lowest hell. 

Early in October Fouquier wrote the follow- 
ing letter to the President of the Conven- 
tion : — 

" ^th Oct. — Citizen President, — I have the 
honour of informing the Convention that the 
decree rendered by it on the 3d of this 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. "J"] 

month, to the effect that the Revolutionary 
Tribunal would immediately without delay 
occupy itself with the judgment of the widow 
Capet, reached me last night; but until now 
no papers relative to Marie Antoinette have 
reached me, so that, with all the desire that 
the Tribunal has of executing the decrees 
of the Convention, it finds itself unable to 
carry out the decree as long as the papers 
are not forthcoming." 

As De Saint Amand writes, the condem- 
nation to death of the Queen is not so 
odious as the interrogatories made to the royal 
children and Madame Elizabeth. Those who 
wish to read these infamous charges will find 
them in Mons. Carapardon's work, " Marie 
Antoinette a la Conciergerie." It is enough 



78 LAST DAYS OF 

to say that those who have the misfortune 
to know what the accusations were will 
know how incapable such a mother as Marie 
Antoinette, and such a saint-like woman as 
Madame Elizabeth were of even thinking of 
such deeds; and to those who still are for- 
tunate enough not to know the depravity of 
human nature, nothing farther need be said, 
except what relates to the course of the trial. 

The unfortunate Dauphin was first exam- 
ined. Utterly demoralized by Simon's treat- 
ment of him, he appears to have said what- 
ever the three scoundrels of the Revolutionary 
Tribunal, David, Pache, and Chaumette, made 
him ; the declaration which the poor little 
fellow signed is in existence, and it is easy 
to see that the child was either too weak or 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 79 

too dormant to do more than make a few- 
vague marks. 

His sister (Madame Royale) was next called 
before these men. Of this interview she 
writes the following account : — " When the 
commissioners arrived at the door of the 
prison, my aunt only opened the door when 
she had finished dressing. Pache asked me 
to come below. My aunt wished to follow me, 
but was not allowed. She asked if I should 
return. Chaumette reassured her, saying, ' You 
may rely on the word of a good republican ; 
she will return.' I overheard my aunt, who 
was trembling all over, and went downstairs. 
I was greatly embarrassed. It was the first 
time that I had been alone with men; I 
had no idea what they wanted with me ; but 



8o LAST DAYS OF 

I recommended myself to God. When I went 
into my brother's room " (the Dauphin, or 
Louis XVII.) " I kissed him ; but I was taken 
from him, and told to go into the next room. 
Chaumette then asked me a number of ques- 
tions of vile accusations against my mother 
and my aunt. I was completely overcome, 
with such a horror, and so indignant, that, in 
spite of all the fear I felt, I could not help 
saying how infamous I thought it. . . . In 
spite of my tears they pressed me to answer. 
They were things which I did not under- 
stand ; but what I understood was so horrible 
that I cried with indignation. I had always 
heard my parents say that it would be prefer- 
able to die than to be the cause of anyone's 
ruin. At length my interrogatory finished 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



at three o'clock ; it had commenced at twelve. 
I begged Chaumette to allow me to join my 
brother. ' I can do nothing,' he said." 

Madame Elizabeth was next examined. 
" They asked her," says her niece in her 
memoir, " the same questions as they had put 
to me, and about those people whom they had 
asked me about. She denied having carried 
on any correspondence with the outer world, 
and answered with intense indignation the 
horrors about which they questioned her. At 
four o'clock she returned upstairs. Her exam- 
ination had only lasted one hour; mine had 
lasted three. This was owing to the deputies 
perceiving that they could not intimidate her, 
as they had hoped to do with one of my 
age " (the Princess was then aged fifteen) ; 

6 



82 LAST DA YS OF 

"but the life I had been leading during the 
last four years, and the example given by 
my parents, had given me greater strength 
of soul." 

Five days after this infamous attempt to 
force from the lips of the Queen's children 
and her sister-in-law confessions of crimes 
against Marie Antoinette, which only the 
imagination of such creatures as those who 
formed the Revolutionary Tribunal were 
capable of suggesting, the Queen's trial com- 
menced. 

The trial, if such a monstrous farce as this 
mock trial of the Queen, who had been con- 
demned by her judges long before, and whose 
long-tried endurance they tried in every way to 
shake, began at six in the evening in the great 



MARIE ANTOINETTE, 83 

chamber above the guardroom of the old palace. 
Danton, who was to beg God and men pardon 
for the act, had instituted the tribunal before 
which the Queen and he himself were both 
doomed to appear, — a tribunal that, between 
its creation on the loth of March, 1793, and 
the 27th July of the following year, sent 2,669 
victims to the guillotine. The great hall 
was plunged in almost total darkness. Only 
two candles were lighted; these were placed 
on a desk at which the registrar of the 
tribunal, Fabricius, sat. The Queen, dressed 
in her widow's cap and her black gown, 
sat on a stool in front of the public prose- 
cutor, Fouquier-Tinville, a man who eveh 
at that time was notorious as being amongst 
the most inhuman of the monsters who then 



84 LAST DAYS OF 

governed revolutionary France. His appear- 
ance has been described by Charles Mouselet 
in his " Histoire Anecdotique du Tribunal 
Revolutionnaire : " — " He had a round-shaped 
head, with thick black hair, a narrow brow, 
a coarse and pock-marked complexion, with 
a hard and defiant expression. It was diffi- 
cult to meet his eyes, so savage was his look. 
When he spoke he lowered his brow, and his 
black eyebrows met. His voice was harsh 
and imperious; at first merely brutal and 
coarse, he became more insolent and violent. 
He seemed intoxicated, maddened with the 
sight of blood, as people become with the 
smell of powder; but his intoxication was 
ferocious, without pity, and every victim 
seemed to be his personal enemy." 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 85 

The tribunal which judged the Queen was 
composed of a president and four judges, the 
public prosecutor, the chief registrar, and fifteen 
jurymen. The President's name was Her- 
man, formerly a judge of the Pas-de-Calais; 
Cofifinhul, Maire, Douze-Verteuil, and Deliege, 
the judges ; the registrar, whose real name 
was Paris, had, in consequence of that being 
the name of the person who killed Michel 
Lepelletier, altered it into the more classical 
and sounding one of Fabricius. The witnesses, 
over forty in number, consisted of all classes. 
They appear to have been selected as much as 
possible from among those who were known 
or thought to be the enemies of the Queen. 

Fouquier-Tinville had himself drawn out at 
great length the act of accusation against the 



86 LAST DA YS OF 

prisoner, which the Queen's counsel, Chau- 
veau-Lagarde, did not exaggerate when he 
characterized it as "Foeuvre d'enfer." In it 
the Queen is compared to Messalina, Brune- 
hauldt, Fredegonde, and the Medici. He 
declared that since her arrival in France she 
had been the curse and leech of the French 
nation ; that she had maintained a secret corre- 
spondence with the man known as the King 
of Bohemia and of Hungary ; that her aim was 
the ruin of the country ; that by her instigation, 
and in concert with the brothers of Louis Capet 
and the infamous Calonne, formerly Minister 
of Finance, she had lavished the wealth of the 
country, the spoils of the sweat of the people, 
in maintaining her criminal expenditure and 
in paying the agents of her treasonable in- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 87 

trigues ; that she had sent millions out of the 
country to the Emperor, in order to maintain 
the war against the Republic, and that she had 
thus exhausted the revenues of the country. 
Farther, that since the commencement of the 
Revolution she had not ceased an instant from 
maintaining a treasonable correspondence with 
the enemy, and by every means in her power 
aided and abetted a counter-revolution. He 
then went back to the celebrated affair of 
the Gardes du Corps at Versailles in 1789 
at great length, and also to the flight of 
Varennes ; accused her of the loss of life on 
the 17th July, 1792, at the Champ de Mars, 
and declared that it is owing to her that the 
massacres occurred at Nancy and elsewhere. 
But it is needless to follow at greater length 



88 LAST DA YS OF 

this endless series of accusations, which seem 
more as if they came from the disordered brain 
of a homicidal maniac than the accusations of 
a man in his senses. Indeed, one can only 
believe that some of the writings and actions of 
the actors in the year of terror 1793 were 
owing to a state of madness. It is said, 
and on good authority, that Fouquier-Tinville 
latterly confessed to being pursued by horrible 
visions, and said that he distinctly saw the 
spirits of those he had sent to death menacing 
him, not in his dreams, like Richard III., but 
in broad daylight. 

In his charge he also referred to the horrors . 
of which the Queen had been accused when 
in the Temple, and if regret could find a 
place in such a nature at having gone so 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 89 

far, the manner in which the Queen met this 
hideous calumny must have told even on 
Fouquier-Tinville. When Robespierre heard 
what a sensation the sublime manner in which 
the Queen had met that charge had made, 
and the effect it had on the audience, he, 
being then at dinner, broke his plate with 
rage, and cursed the folly of Hebert and 
Tinville in preferring it. 

The first day's trial seems to have been un- 
important. The Queen, on being asked her 
name, replied, " Marie Antoinette de Lorraine 
d'Autriche, aged thirty-eight, widow of the 
King of France." As M. De Saint Amand 
remarks, she was not so old as she said, as 
only on the 2d of November would she enter 
her thirty-ninth year. 



90 LAST DA YS OF 

Q. You had, before the Revolution, politi- 
cal relations with the King of Bohemia and 
Hungary, which relations were opposed to the 
interests of France? 

A. The King of Bohemia being my brother, 
I had no other but friendly intelligence with 
him, and not political. If they had been the 
latter, they would but have benefited France, 
to which country my marriage had allied 
me. 

Q. Not content with ruining the finances of 
France for your pleasures and intrigues, in 
concert with infamous Ministers, you sent out 
of the country which nourished you millions 
to the Emperor? 

A. Never! I know this accusation has often 
been brought against me. I loved my hus- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 91 

band too well to dilapidate his country. My 
brother had no need of French money; and 
by the ties which held me to France I could 
not have given him any. 

Q. It is you who taught Louis Capet the 
profound art of dissimulation, wherewith he 
too long deceived the good French people, 
who could not imagine such depths of perfidy 
possible } 

A. Yes. The people have been deceived, 
and most cruelly, but neither by my husband 
nor by me. 

Q. You have never ceased for an instant 
to wish to destroy liberty; on any terms you 
wished to govern, and to reascend the throne 
over the corpses of the patriots } 

A. We had no need to remount the throne ; 



92 LAST DAYS OF 

we were on it. We never wished anything but 
the happiness of France; that she might be 
happy, this was all we desired. 

Q. What interest do you attach to the aims 
of the Republic? 

A. The happiness of France is what I desire 
above all things. 

Q. Do you think that kings are necessary 
to ensure the happiness of nations? 

A. An individual cannot decide such a 
question. 

Q. You doubtless regret that your son has 
lost a throne, on which he might have been 
seated, if it had not been that the people, en- 
lightened as to their rights, had broken it? 

A. I should never regret anything for my 
son, as long as my country is happy. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 93 

Two names that will be remembered as 
long as any of the actors of this tragedy now 
appear, — Tronson-Ducoudray and Chauveau- 
Lagarde. The latter has left an account of 
his interview with the Queen, whose honoura- 
ble mission, with Ducoudray, was to appear 
as her defender. Lagarde was out of Paris on 
the 15th of October when a message reached 
him to present himself at the Conciergerie. 
He was told at the same time that the trial 
would be resumed at eight o'clock on the 
morning following. He lost not a moment in 
presenting himself before his client. 

" No one," he writes in his account of 
Marie Antoinette's trial, — "no one who can 
put himself into my place, and, forcing him- 
self in such a spot, can but imagine what 



94 LAST DAYS OF 

my feelings were on seeing the august pris- 
oner, widow of the pious descendant of St. 
Louis, daughter of the Emperor of Germany, 
a Queen who, by her grace and goodness, had 
been the joy of the most brilHant court in 
Europe, and who had once been the idol of 
the French nation. 

"On approaching the Queen, my knees 
trembled, my eyes filled with tears. I was 
far more embarrassed than if I had been pre- 
sented to the Queen and seen her in the midst 
of her court, surrounded by all the pomp of 
power. She received me with so serene a 
majesty that I was soon reassured. I read 
with her the act of accusation. On reading 
this infernal work, I alone was overcome. The 
Queen with perfect self-possession spoke to 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 95 

me about it. She noticed that the gendarme 
could overhear her, but, saying that this was 
of no consequence, she continued her con- 
versation with the same cahn." 

After inspecting the papers regarding the 
Queen and the heads of accusations brought 
against her, he found it impossible to arrange 
a defence during the short interval allowed 
him. He returned to the Queen, and in- 
formed her that it was absolutely necessary 
to obtain a delay in order that he should 
prepare the defence. " To whom will you 
apply," asked the Queen, "for this delay.?" 
When he said, " To the National Conven- 
tion," the Queen at first positively refused, 
so great was her detestation of that body, 
which had ordered the execution of her 



96 LAST DAYS OF 

husband. But Chauveau-Lagarde declared 
it must be done ; that it behooved him 
and his colleague not to omit any circum- 
stance that could be of use to their cause; 
that without a thorough examination of all 
the accusations brought against her they 
would fail in their duty; that it was not 
necessary for the Queen to frame under her 
own name the demand to the Convention, 
but to address, in the name of her advocates, 
a plea against a precipitancy of action which 
was an outrage to the name of justice. They 
had not only, he urged, to defend the Queen, 
but also the widow of Louis XVI., the 
mother of that monarch's children, and the 
sister whose name had been placed with hers 
in the accusation. The Queen, till then in- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 97 

flexible, now gave way to his entreaties ; and 
herself wrote a letter to the Assembly, in 
the name of her defenders, claiming a delay 
for them. The letter was as follows: — 

" Citizen President, — The Citizens Tronson 
and Chauveau, whom the Tribunal have 
given me as defenders, call my attention to 
the fact that they have only to-day been told 
of their mission, and in so short a time it is 
impossible for them to examine the charges, 
or even to go through them. I owe it to 
my children to omit no way of entirely 
justifying myself of these charges. My de- 
fenders ask for a delay of three days; I 
trust that the Convention will accord this to 

them." 

7 



98 LAST DA YS OF 

This letter, when it reached the hands of 
Fouquier-Tinville, went no farther; no notice 
was taken of it, and on the following morn- 
ing (15th October) the Queen's trial was 
resumed. 

On her second examination the Queen 
was allowed a chair. She wore the same 
dress as when she first appeared before her 
judges, and during the long day and far 
into the next night maintained the composure 
which had struck even those who most hated 
her. At times she seemed unconscious of the 
scene enacted around her, and her fingers 
were observed to run on the arms of the chair 
as if she were playing on a pianoforte. 

Poor Rosalie seems to have been much 
distressed at the Queen having been taken 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 99 

from her prison at eight in the morning 
without having had any kind of food, and 
it was not till four in the afternoon that 
she managed to obtain some broth for her. 
But Rosalie had not the satisfaction of being 
allowed to take it herself to the Queen ; and 
she indignantly tells how one of the commis- 
saries of police snatched the plate from her 
hands and gave it to an overdressed woman 
who was by him, who had expressed a desire 
to see the prisoner, and who took it hence, 
after having spilled half its contents. 

The hall was densely crowded. Among the 
mob that came in order to enjoy the spec- 
tacle of the poor woman, once their Queen, 
being for hours browbeaten by Fouquier-Tin- 
ville, may have been a few sympathisers, a 



lOO LAST DAYS OF 

few still loyal at heart, and with deepest 
sympathy for her to whom they were unable 
even to show a sign of pity or respect. Some 
arrests were made by one of the inspectors of 
prisons, who had distinguished himself in the 
human butcheries of September; but only once 
did the crowd, for one instant roused by the 
noble dignity of the prisoner and the atrocious 
charge preferred against her, show any feeling 
in her favour. 

The Queen, emaciated and pale as death, 
took her seat, after being told by the Presi- 
dent that she might seat herself. The act 
of accusation was read, and the witnesses 
appeared. Of these there were forty-one — 
men of all sorts and conditions. Among them 
was an ex-admiral and general, Charles Henri 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. lOI 

d'Estaing, ex-Marquis Latour du Pin, ex-Mayor 
of Paris, Jean Sylvain Bailly (all these three 
doomed to the guillotine), merchants and 
gendarmes, a doctor, an artist, servants and 
jailers. Among the forty-and-one, Simon, the 
jailer of the Dauphin; Lecointre, who was a 
national guard at Versailles in the days of 
October; and Hebert, the notorious editor of 
the " Pere Duchesne," were specially selected 
as known enemies of the prisoner; and a 
woman named Reine Millot, formerly a servant 
in the royal family, who declared that the 
Queen had sent two hundred million francs 
to Vienna. These were ready to swear any- 
thing, however improbable, however atrocious, 
against the Queen. 

As might have been expected, such men as 



I02 LAST DAYS OF 

Bailly, D'Estaing, Latour du Pin, and Bernier, 
the doctor of the Queen's children, treated the 
august captive with respect. They knew that 
this conduct would but ensure their own death- 
warrants; and even Manuel, formerly one of the 
chiefs of the commune, now appeared touched 
by so much misery so nobly endured. 

All through the long hours of that awful 
day the different witnesses were questioned and 
cross-questioned. She saw again faces famil- 
iar to her in the past years — faces that must 
have recalled Versailles and the Tuileries; 
and with what feelings of horror must she 
have recognised her son's jailer and perse- 
cutor among that crowd of witnesses! 

When Hebert's time arrived, and the 
charges relative to the conduct of the Queen 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 03 

with her son were again alluded to, the Queen 
deigned no reply. Seeing this, one of the 
jurors called the attention of the President 
to her silence. One can imagine what a hush 
must at that moment have fallen on that 
great crowd, eager to know what the Queen 
would answer to such an infamy. But Marie 
Antoinette was equal, aye, more than equal, to 
the occasion. She rose from her chair, and 
with a majestic voice exclaimed, " If I have 
not answered, it is because Nature herself 
refuses to answer such an accusation made 
to a mother. I appeal to all that may be 
present." A thrill ran through the vast hall 
— a thrill that has not ceased to be felt by 
all who can enter into what the feelings of 
that mother were at such a moment. No 



I04 LAST DAYS OF 

wonder that, later in the day, a rumour got 
abroad that, after all, the Queen would be 
spared — would be transported, but not exe- 
cuted, and that Rosalie heard it said that the 
Queen had answered like an angel. 

Throughout the trial there does not seem 
to have been amongst the crowd any strong 
expression of feeling either against or for the 
Queen ; but they frequently called on her 
to rise, so that she should be better seen 
than when seated ; and once at this demand 
she had said, "When will the people be tired 
of my sufferings ? " 

Although none of the witnesses could bring 
any proof of the things some alleged against 
her, such as that she had intrigued with some 
of the municipals when in the Temple, as 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 105 

Simon swore; or that she had, as Tissot 
averred (the editor of a sheet only second in 
sanguinary abominations to that of the P^re 
Duchesne), given bonds which he declared he 
had seen signed by her to obtain money out 
of the public treasury, none of these were 
produced; nor could the letter which Didier 
Journeil swore he had seen, in which the 
Queen asked if the Swiss guard were to 
be trusted, and if they would be prepared 
to act when the time came. Although none 
of these accusations could be in any way 
proved, it was clear that the Queen was pre- 
judged long before she appeared before the 
Revolutionary bar, and that Fouquier-Tinville 
had already her death-warrant in his pocket 
ready to sign. 



I06 LAST DAYS OF 

The Queen was asked the most trivial ques« 
tions as well as the most outrageously absurd. 

" Did you not," the President asks her, 
** abuse your influence over your husband 
in order to get funds out of the public 
treasury ? " 

" Never," replies the Queen. 

Q. Where, then, did you obtain all the 
money with which you built and furnished the 
Little Trianon, where you gave fetes of which 
you were always the goddess? 

A. It was from a fund that had been 
made specially for that purpose. 

Q. Was it not at the Little Trianon that 
you became first acquainted with the La- 
motte ? 

A, I never even saw her. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE, 107 

Q. Was she not your victim in the famous 
case about the diamond necklace ? 

A. She could not have been, for I did not 
know her. 

Q. You then persist in saying that you did 
not know her? 

A. My place is not to deny; it is only 
the truth I have told, and intend to tell. 

Q. Did you not oblige the Ministers of 
Finance to deliver up to her funds; and on 
some of them refusing, did you not threaten 
them with your displeasure? 

A. Never. 

Q. Did you not ask Vergennes to send 
six millions to the King of Bohemia and 
Hungary? 

A, No. 



Io8 LAST DAYS OF 

She is then accused of having been taken 
into the confidence of the King, through a 
letter written to a Minister, regarding the plan 
of a campaign, with the intention, probably 
understood, of inciting a civil war. The 
Queen had never heard of such a letter. 
However, the President again told her that 
it was notorious that her influence over the 
King was such as to make him do as she 
wished; and this charge, which to us seems 
not at all an unnatural one, knowing how 
very weak and wavering a man was poor 
Louis, appeared a capital crime to those 
who had a few months ago sentenced the 
King to death, as being the cause of the 
internecine war and for corresponding with 
the enemy. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 109 

Even the Queen's family name was brought 
against her as a proof of crime. President 
Herman declared that as the Queen gave 
her name as that of Marie Antoinette de 
Lorraine d'Autriche, it follows that she in- 
tended seizing Lorraine and transferring it to 
Germany. 

" Did you not," he asks, " conceive such a 
project at the time of your marriage ? " 

On the Queen denying this absurd charge, 
the President remarked that she called her- 
self by the name of that province. He then 
changed his ground, and demanded why the 
Queen had treated her son (Louis XVII.) 
in such a way that it was evident she looked 
on him as the successor of his father on the 
throne. 



no LAST DAYS OF 

The Queen simply answered this by saying 
her son was too young to talk to on the 
subject; that he sat at the end of the table 
at meals, and that she waited on him herself 
when he required it. 

At four o'clock the sitting was suspended 
for an hour. It was not till then that the 
Queen, who must have been half dead with 
fatigue and thirst, got some broth, carried to 
her, as I have already said, not by Rosalie, 
but by the hands of a stranger. That there 
was risk in showing even so small an attention 
to the prisoner is shown in the case of the 
gendarme de Busne, who had, when no one 
else dared, brought her a glass of water. For 
this action, or for having offered her his 
arm when, half blind as she had become, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. Ill 

the Queen could scarcely see her way along 
the darkening corridors of the prison, he was 
cashiered and imprisoned. 

At the end of the examination of the 
forty-one witnesses, the President asked the 
Queen if she had anything to say for her 
defence. 

" Yesterday," answered she, " I did not know 
the name of my witnesses, and did not know 
what they would charge me with. Not one 
of them has brought any single proof against 
me. I end by saying, that, being the wife of 
Louis XVI., I had to conform to his wishes." 

Fouquier-Tinville then launched out in a 
tirade against the Queen, who had been, he 
declared, the cause of all the misfortunes of 
the country. 



1 1 2 LAST DA YS OF 

It was midnight when the President in- 
formed the Queen's defenders that in a quarter 
of an hour the hearing of the witnesses would 
end, and that they had to be ready with 
their defence. A quarter of an hour was 
given to the two advocates to answer the 
host of statements that had been deposed 
to during the last twelve hours against 
her. They were merely listened to as 
a mere matter of form, Tinville being im- 
patient to close this lugubrious farce of a 
trial. 

When they had finished, Herman, the 
President, summed up in a virulent diatribe, 
in which he said that at length a great 
example, a great act of justice, was given 
to the universe. " At length," he said, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. II3 

"equality triumphs. A woman that had been 
surrounded by all that was most brilliant, 
all that the pride of kings and the servility of 
slaves could invent, now occupies in the face 
of the people's tribunal the same position 
as any other malefactor. In this matter 
not single actions or crimes have been sub- 
mitted to your conscience and your enlight- 
enment. You have to judge the entire life of 
the accused since she seated herself by the 
side of the last King of the French. If one 
could have done so, we should have called 
before the jury the shades of our brothers 
massacred at Nancy, in the Champ de Mars, 
in the frontier, in the Vendee, at Marseilles, 
at Lyons, and at Toulon, destroyed in conse- 
quence of the infernal machinations of this 



114 LAST DAYS OF 

modern Medicis." In conclusion he said, 
"As I have already stated, it is the entire 
nation who accuse Antoinette; all the politi- 
cal events that have occurred during the last 
five years are due to her, and arraign her. 
The following are the questions which the 
tribunal submits to you," — addressing the 
jury: — " ist, Has it been proved that intrigues 
have been carried on between foreign powers 
and other external enemies of the republic; 
and if so, have those intrigues afforded them 
help and money which has enabled them to 
invade the French territory and facilitated 
the progress of their arms? 2nd, Has Marie 
Antoinette of Austria, widow of Louis Capet, 
been found guilty of co-operating with such 
manoeuvres, and carried on intelligence with 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. II5 

the enemy? 3rd, Has it been shown that 
a conspiracy has existed inciting a civil war 
in the interior of the republic? 4th, Has 
Marie Antoinette been found guilty of abet- 
ting such a conspiracy ? " 

After being out of court an hour, the jury 
returned into the audience chamber. The 
chief juryman gave an affirmative answer to 
all the four counts of the indictment. 

The Queen, who had left the hall at the 
same time as the jury, was now led in again. 
The President read the declaration of the 
jury aloud. Fouquier-Tinville then announced 
that, in conformity with the two rules laid 
down by the application of criminal law, Marie 
Antoinette is sentenced to death; her goods, 
if any, to be confiscated to the Republic ; and 



Il6 LAST DAYS OF 

that the just judgment be carried out with- 
in twenty-four hours in the Square of the 
Revolution. Herman inquired if the accused 
had any observation to make regarding the 
application of the law as invoked by the pub- 
lic prosecutor. For answer the Queen merely 
shook her head. The sentence of death was 
then delivered. 

It was ten minutes past four in the morn- 
ing of the 1 6th of October. The Queen 
had, with hardly an interval, endured this 
trial more than twenty hours. 

The Queen appeared the calmest and the 
least excited person in court; she displayed 
no sign of emotion. Rising from her seat, she 
walked away calmly and serenely, leaving her 
judges — or rather murderers — without one 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 17 

look of reproach or a shade of anger. But 
on nearing the portion of the hall where, 
beyond the barriers, the mob was collected, 
she raised somewhat her noble head. There 
does not seem to have been any demonstra- 
tion here, amidst the people who loved to 
jeer and mock the condemned as they were 
led back to prison, in the short interval that 
was left them still between time and eternity. 
It may well be that the long patience of the 
Queen, her simple deportment, and yet the 
stately appearance of the woman, checked any 
such show of feeling even among the mob, 
eager to behold suffering and to feast their 
eyes on the last moments of the victims of the 
Revolution. 

A great French painter has left a picture 



Il8 LAST DAYS OF 

of this scene. The Queen faces the spec- 
tator as she walks along the side of the 
barriers, above which the mixed crowd are 
eagerly scanning her; behind follow the gen- 
darmes with shouldered muskets; beyond, 
under the dim light of a lamp, appear the 
faces of the judges — a lurid background. Dela- 
roche has introduced the thin handsome face 
of a youth, who seems to feel the iniquity 
of the transaction keenly: we recognise the 
features of Bonaparte. Next to the almost 
angelic sublimity of the figure of the Queen, 
the most touching thing in the picture is the 
face of a young girl, who gazes with a look of 
ineffable pity through her tears at the Queen 
as she walks by. 

Very truly has Sainte-Beuve written of this 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 19 

trial of Marie Antoinette. " I do not believe," 
he says, " that a monument of more atrocious 
stupidity, of greater ignominy for our species, 
can exist than this trial of Marie Antoinette, 
such as it can be read in the 29th volume of 
Parliamentary History of the French Revolu- 
tion. Most of the Queen's answers have been 
altered or suppressed, but, as in all iniquitous 
trials, the very text of the accusations tells 
against the assassins. When one reflects that 
a century which considered itself enlightened 
and of the most refined civilization, ends with 
public acts of such barbarity, one begins to 
doubt of human nature itself, and to fear that 
the brute which is always in human nature 
has the ascendancy." 

In the accounts of the last hours of the 



I20 LAST DAYS OF 

Queen there are some discrepancies. Though 
De Goncourt, for instance, in his admirable 
life of Marie Antoinette, says, that after her 
condemnation Marie Antoinette was not led 
back to the prison she had occupied since the 
1 1 th of September, but to the condemned cell, 
a prison constructed in one of the angles of the 
outer ward, Saint Amand and others state, on 
the other hand, that the prisoner passed the 
few hours left her before execution in her old 
prison; and this seems to me, from several 
circumstances, more probable than the for- 
mer version. Nor does Rosalie Lamorliere 
refer to the Queen having been removed 
to another prison after the trial, which she 
would doubtless have done had it taken 
place. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 121 

But one alteration the Queen must have 
noticed on her return to prison ; this was, 
that the gendarme de Busne, who had shown 
enough compassion to bring her a glass of 
water when she complained of thirst, and who, 
when, half blind and weak from the long fast 
and the accumulated misery she had endured, 
and almost falling, on coming to the steps 
which lead down to the corridor, let fall that 
piteous complaint, "I can go no farther; I 
cannot see," had given her his arm, was no 
longer there to assist her. 

In those last hours it seems that the guard 
over the Queen was a little relaxed. She was 
allowed for the first time a light, and the turn- 
key was allowed to bring her writing materials. 
It was then that she wrote that letter to her 



122 LAST DAYS OF 

sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, which is the 
noblest memento to her memory. It must 
have been broad daylight before she could 
have finished that letter — the light of her last 
day in this troublesome world. 

To have been able, after all she had gone 
through, to write that noble letter, so firm even 
in its writing, so divine in its forgiveness of 
her enemies, so tender in its allusions and its 
affection for her loved ones, proves, if farther 
proof were necessary, what a glorious charac- 
ter was that of the Queen — a character and 
nature which had come out so nobly from the 
fierce fire of suffering and trial such as few 
human beings can have known or conceived. 

The letter, which it is almost a sacrilege 
to attempt to translate, is as follows: — 




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MARIE ANTOINETTE. 123 

" 16M October^ half-past four d clock of the 
morning. — It is to you, my sister, that I write 
for the last time. I have been condemned — 
not to a shameful death, it is only such to crim- 
inals,^ but to rejoin your brother. Innocent 
like him, I hope to show the same firmness as 
he in the last moments. I am calm, as one is 
when one's conscience has nothing to reproach 
one with. I feel a profound regret to leave my 
poor children ; you know I lived but for them. 
And for you, my good and tender sister — you, 
who by your friendship have sacrificed every- 
thing in order to remain with us, in what a 
situation do I leave you! I have learnt in 
the course of the trial that my daughter has 

1 The Queen must have had Corneille's fine line in her 
mind— "Le crime fait la honte, et non I'dchafaud"— when 
she wrote this passage. 



124 LAST DAYS OF 

been separated from you. Alas ! poor child ! 
I dare not write to her; she would not re- 
ceive my letter. I do not know even if this 
will reach you. Receive for them both, by 
this, my benediction. I hope that one day, 
when they will be older, that they will be again 
united with you, to enjoy your tender care. 
May they both think of what I have never 
ceased to instil into them, that high principle, 
and the exact performance of duty, are the 
most important things in life; that affection 
and mutual trust will ensure its happiness ; 
that my daughter may feel at her present 
age that she must ever be ready to help 
her brother by advice, which the larger 
experience she possesses and her affection 
may dictate. May my son, for his part, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 125 

render every attention to his sister, every 
service that affection can prompt. May 
they mutually feel that, in whatever position 
they may find themselves, that their only hap- 
piness can be in mutual affection. May they 
take example by us. How often in our mis- 
fortunes has our affection been our consolation ! 
When one is happy, one's happiness is doubled 
by sharing it with a friend ; and where can one 
find a friend more tender, more true, than in 
one's own family ? May my son never, never 
forget the last words of his father, which I now 
repeat expressly to him : ' That he must never 
seek to revenge our death.' I have to speak 
to you of a subject very painful to my heart. 
I know how much trouble this child must have 
caused you ; forgive him, my dear sister ; 



126 LAST DAYS OF 

think of his age, and how easy it is to get a 
child to say what one wants, and even what he 
himself cannot understand. A day will come, 
I hope, when he will feel all the more all he 
owes to your tenderness for both of us. It still 
remains for me to confide to you my last 
thoughts. I had wished to write them at the 
beginning of the trial; but besides my not 
being allowed to write, the proceedings have 
been so rapid that I should not even have had 
time enough. I die in the Catholic apostolic 
and Roman religion, that of my fathers, in which 
I have been brought up, and which I have 
always professed; having no spiritual consola- 
tion to expect, not knowing whether there still 
exist here any priests of that religion; and 
even if there were, the place where I am 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 27 

would expose them too much if they were to 
come here. I sincerely demand pardon of 
God of all the faults I may have committed. 
I hope that in His goodness He will deign 
to receive my last prayers, as well as those 
which I have made for a long while, that 
He will deign to receive my soul in His 
mercy and goodness. I ask pardon of all 
I know, and of you, my sister, in particular, 
for all the trouble that, without meaning, I 
may have caused them. I forgive my ene- 
mies all the harm they have done me. I 
bid farewell to my aunts and all my brothers 
and sisters. 

" I had friends ; the idea of being for ever 
separated from them and their sorrows is one 
of the greatest regrets that I carry away with 



128 LAST DAYS OF 

me in my death. May they learn, at least, 
that until my last moment I thought of them. 

" Adieu, my good and tender sister ; may 
this letter reach you! Think always of me: I 
kiss you with my whole heart, as well as those 
poor dear children. My God! how agonising 
it is to leave them for ever ! Adieu, adieu I I 
will now only occupy myself with my spiritual 
duties. As my actions are not free, they may 
perhaps bring me a priest ; but I here protest 
that I will not say a word to him, and that 
I will treat him as a perfect stranger." 

This letter never reached its destination. 
Bault gave it into the charge of Fouquier- 
Tinville, who kept it. When he was arrested 
after the " 9th Thermidor," this letter was 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 129 

seized with his other papers. On it may 
be seen Fouquier-Tinville's signature, as well 
as those of the commissioners, Lecointre, 
Legot, and Massieu. In 18 16 the letter 
was first made public. An ex-Conventionist, 
Courtois, gave it to some person unknown, 
who presented it to Louis XVIII. It is 
now carefully preserved in a cabinet in the 
archives of the city of Paris, where I was 
permitted, through the courtesy of the offi- 
cials, to have a photograph taken of it. 

In the expiatory chapel to the memory of 
Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette in Paris, 
at the base of the monument to the Queen 
this letter has been engraved in the marble. 
Never, indeed, has a more touching last will 
and testament been handed down to posterity. 

9 



1 30 LAST DA YS OF 

The letter ends somewhat abruptly, and it 
has been conjectured that the Queen was in- 
terrupted before she had finished her letter ; 
but as it is, nothing more is needed. The 
allusion made to the probable visit of a 
priest, and to her intention of treating him 
as an absolute stranger, refers to the proba- 
bility of one of the priests who had sworn 
fidelity to the constitution being sent to 
her. It is difficult now to realise the hor- 
ror which these Revolutionist priests inspired 
among Roman Catholics during the days 
of the Revolution. It was with the greatest 
difficulty that Louis XVI. was forced to 
give way regarding the rights of the priest- 
hood; and the Queen had a perfect horror 
of these men, who had, as she considered, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 131 

become traitors to God and to their re- 
ligion. 

In Madame Royale's memoir allusion is 
made to the supposed visit of a priest, by 
whom the sacraments were administered to 
the Queen ; but I think this is a case of the 
wish having been father to the thought; and 
neither Rosalie Lamorliere nor the wife of 
Bault alludes to such an occurrence, which, 
had it taken place, they would most probably 
have done. I believe the only priest who 
saw the Queen was one named Girard, the 
cure of the Church of Saint-Landry, who 
entered her prison at half-past seven on the 
day of her death. He asked her whether 
she would confess herself to him. She asked 
him who he was. He replied, "A cure of 



132 LAST BAYS OF 

Paris." " There are few such," said the 
Queen. He then asked the Queen if he 
should accompany her to the scaffold. " As 
you please," she answered ; but she pre- 
ferred making her peace with God alone to 
confessing to a man whom she considered 
a renegade and a perjured servant of her 
Lord. 

After writing her letter, the Queen lay 
down on her bed, where, coming into the 
prison, Rosalie found her. She complained 
of suffering from cold, and had covered her 
feet with her pillow. An officer of the 
gendarmerie was seated in a corner of the 
room when Rosalie entered. The Queen, 
whose face was turned to the wall, was cry- 
ing silently, and had probably not slept. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 33 

Rosalie asked her if she would have any 
food. " Bring me a little broth," she an- 
swered ; but was only able to swallow a few 
spoonfuls. 

At eight o'clock, after the priest had seen 
Marie Antoinette, Rosalie returned to the 
Queen to help her to change her dress. The 
Queen with her own hands laid out her shirt, 
and the white gown she had kept for this her 
last appearance in public. The gendarme, 
who never let his prisoner out of sight for 
an instant, approached the two women — the 
Queen, who had stooped behind the low 
screen, so as to be as much hidden as 
possible, and Rosalie, who stood in front of 
her. Seeing this, Marie Antoinette implored 
him, while hastily crossing her shawl over 



134 LAST DAYS OF 

her shoulders, with extreme gentleness, to 
be allowed to change her clothes without 
his watching her. " I cannot consent to 
that," was the brutal answer ; " my orders 
are to watch all your movements." The 
Queen sighed, and, with as much secrecy 
as was possible, changed her dress, remov- 
ing the black gown she had worn during 
the trial, and replacing it with the white 
one, tying the muslin (fichu) shawl behind 
her, after crossing it below her neck, and 
was now ready for death. 

Rosalie, who dared not even bid the 
Queen farewell, now left her, retiring to her 
room, where we can well believe that "she 
wept bitterly." There was enough, surely, to 
make the very stones cry out and weep. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 35 

Between that hour — soon after eight — and 
ten the Queen was engaged in prayer. 

At ten the turnkey Lariviere entered the 
prison; he was the son of the old woman 
who had waited on the Queen when she 
first came to the Conciergerie. He said 
that Bault had told him to go to the 
Queen, and to wait there for him. The 
Queen asked him to thank his mother for 
the trouble she had taken when with her, 
and to pray for her. 

Another gendarme had meanwhile entered 
the prison, and soon after the judges entered 
with the registrar, Fabricius. The Queen, 
who had been on her knees by her truckle- 
bed, now rose to receive them. Hebert 
addressed her first. " Listen," said he, " to 



1 36 LAST DA YS OF 

your sentence." All four took off their hats, 
which appears to have struck the others as 
a peculiar mark of respect ; — of respect, I 
take it, to the Tribunal, and not intended 
as a mark of respect to the Queen, al- 
though Bault's wife remarks that they seemed 
struck by the majestic appearance of the 
Queen. 

" It is unnecessary," said Marie Antoinette, 
" to read it ; I know but too well the sen- 
tence." 

One of the judges said, " That is of no 
consequence; it has to be read to you a 
second time." 

The Queen said no more, and the sen- 
tence was read. 

While this was going on, the executioner, 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 37 

Sanson, a youth of gigantic stature, entered. 
He approached the Queen and said, " Give 
me your hands." 

The Queen for the moment appeared to 
lose her self-control and started back. *' Will 
my hands be tied? The King's were not." 
(Here the poor Queen made a mistake, as 
Louis's hands were fastened, but not till he 
had reached the scaffold.) 

" Do your duty ! " said the judges to 
Sanson ; and those fair white hands were 
roughly and "too tightly" [trop fort) bound 
by a cord behind her back. 

To revert for a moment to the costume 
the Queen wore at her execution. Besides 
the gown and shawl, both of which were 
white, she had placed a small linen cap on 



138 LAST DAYS OF 

her head, but had removed the black 
widow's crape bands that till that day had 
gone around it, and, falling at the sides, were 
attached by a loose knot over her breast. 
This detail is not as trivial as it may 
seem, for it shows how much the poor 
woman must have realised her last moments, 
and had so prepared her head-dress that in 
a moment she could remove her cap and 
be ready for the fatal blow. On her feet 
were a pair of high-heeled shoes, which 
she had taken great care of. The shape of 
these high-heeled shoes was called "^ la 
St. Huberty'' Whether or not she her- 
self had cut her hair before Sanson ap- 
peared, as some think (the De Goncourts, 
among others, state this as being the case 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 39 

in their history of her last moments), or 
whether, which I think far more probable, 
seeing that no scissors or other implement 
whereby she could have cut her hair with 
her own hands was allowed her, her hair 
was cut by the executioner — which is the 
view taken by Mons. de Saint Amand — 
it was the '' derniere toilette,'' as the French 
style this last preparation of the victim for 
the scaffold. According to Madame Bault's 
account, the Queen's hair was cut by Sanson 
after he had tied her arms, — arms " that were 
not born for bondage," — behind her back. 
The Queen, looking back, could see him 
placing the shorn tresses in his pocket. 
"This I saw," adds Madame Bault, "and 
I would I had never seen that sight," — a 



I40 LAST DAYS OF 

sight which, she might well say, she " could 
never forget." 

There seems some reason to believe that 
even at this last hour an attempt would 
still be made to rescue the Queen. Some 
scheme of delivering the Queen on her way 
to the Place de la Revolution appears to 
have been concocted, but, like all the attempts 
made to save her, it only ended disastrously. 
Two people were arrested by the police — a 
woman named Fournier and a young wigmaker, 
Basset by name. They were both executed. 
A strange circumstance was, that immediately 
after the Queen's execution a man named 
Maingot was found beneath the guillotine dip- 
ping his handkerchief in the Queen's blood. 
He had a pink in his mouth, which some have 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 141 

thought was a rallying-badge, and possibly he 
was connected with De Rougeville and his 
friends. The authorities, however, had taken 
every precaution to make even the most de- 
termined attempt at a rescue impossible. As 
early as five that morning nearly all the troops 
in Paris were under arms; the roll of the 
drum was heard through all the sections ; the 
streets along which lay the route of the 
Queen's passage were lined with troops, of 
whom, at seven o'clock, thirty thousand were 
afoot. The bridges were guarded with 
cannon, the gunners standing by ready with 
lighted matches; artillery were also placed on 
the principal open places and points of junc- 
tion. At ten o'clock no carriage was allowed 
in any of the streets that lie between the 



142 LAST DAYS OF 

Conciergerie and the Place de la Revolution ; 
and all Paris was patrolled. All this military 
display, which sounds as if an enemy's army 
were at the very gates of Paris, had been 
brought out merely to see a woman die ! The 
whole town seemed to be in the streets that 
morning. It was thickest in front of the Con- 
ciergerie, before the yard through which the 
prisoner would pass. Before those beautiful 
iron gates, on which the royal arms of France 
and the golden lilies are conspicuous, every 
window near had its group of spectators ; the 
very house-tops were covered with the people. 
The crowd was immense here, but in the vast 
space around the guillotine it was still greater. 
The terraces of the Tuileries gardens were 
crowded — so were the Champs Elysees; and 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 43 

wherever a glimpse of the guillotine could be 
obtained, there the people waited. Every 
window along the Rue St. Honore held spec- 
tators, although the people had been warned 
not to appear at their windows. 

Eleven o'clock strikes. The wretched open 
cart, with its single horse, its plank the only 
seat, without even the luxury of straw, has 
been already driven into the yard of the 
prison. In fifteen minutes more there is a 
stir among the people; all eyes are now fixed 
on the barred gates on the right at the end 
of the courtyard, and the Queen ascends the 
prison steps. 

On seeing the cart she made an involuntary 
pause, expecting that she would have had a 
covered carriage to go in, as had been allowed 



144 LAST DAYS OF 

the King; but the Revolution since the 21st 
of January had gone on apace, and no more 
exception would be made for her than for the 
other victims of its judgments. The people 
seemed to approve of the Queen's hands being 
tied behind her, and Sanson made a point 
of displaying the cords. Still, with proud 
step and undaunted mien, Marie Antoinette 
advances. In a moment more she reaches 
the steps placed against the back of the cart, 
and at first seats herself with her face to the 
horse. Sanson has placed his hand beneath 
her elbow to help her up those unsteady steps ; 
she thanks him with a .look, and gets in 
alone. Seeing she has placed herself facing the 
horse, he tells her to alter her position, and she 
now seats herself with her back to the horse. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 45 

Girard the priest, in laic dress, sits next her ; 
Sanson is behind the Queen. Both he and 
his assistant have their three-cornered hats 
under their arms. " On that occasion," as De 
Goncourt remarks, "the only people who be 
haved with decency were the executioners." 

The via dolorosa of the Queen was a long 
one — the distance not great ; but in order to 
make Marie Antoinette, as one of the Jacobins 
said, " drink long of death," the carriage was 
made to go at a foot's pace. During the first 
part of the road traversed the mob appear to 
have been too much amazed on seeing this 
white-robed figure, so simple and yet so grand in 
its forlornness — a woman whom many of them 
had only beheld formerly through the windows 
of a gilded coach led by eight horses and sur- 

10 



146 LAST DAYS OF 

rounded by a brilliant body-guard of cavalry — 
now in this miserable cart which slowly jolted 
over the rough pavement, with the public exe- 
cutioner holding her imprisoned hands, to do 
more than stare, and not till the procession 
had got as far down as the Church of Saint- 
Roch did the insults begin. Near this place a 
scoundrel named Grammont, formerly an actor, 
with the recommendation of having assisted 
at the massacre of the loyalist prisoners at 
Orleans and Versailles — he is reported to have 
drank wine out of the freshly-cleaved skull of 
one of the unfortunate people he had murdered 
— led the way, prancing on horseback, and 
inciting the mob to insult the Queen. Gram- 
mont had taken the pains to place some of the 
lowest of the rabble at various points of van- 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 147 

tage, and when the Queen was led slowly by 
them, these wretches, who had been liberally 
supplied by Grammont with spirits, yelled and 
shouted and mouthed at her. Grammont, 
with his sword drawn, cursed the crowd for not 
being more violent. That Marie Antoinette 
expected a terrible ordeal ere death released 
her is shown by her having asked one of the 
gendarmes in her prison whether he thought 
she would be allowed to reach the scaffold 
without being torn to pieces on the way. The 
man did his best to reassure her. 

The line of this death-drive — this slow 
agony of an unfortunate woman — can still be 
followed. Crossing the Pont-au-Change, the 
quay is followed as far as the Louvre ; then 
passing along the Rue-du-Roule, the long 



148 LAST DAYS OF 

winding street of Saint-Honore is reached. 
It is there, in the narrowest part, by the 
Church of Saint-Roch, as it still exists, that 
the best idea of what this sight must have 
been on that day can be judged, for most of 
the houses are older than the first Revolution. 
It was from a window of one of the houses 
in this street the painter David drew a 
terrible outline of the -Queen seated in the 
cart. David's participation in some of the 
bloodiest scenes of that time will render his 
memory ever odious. He seems, from personal 
spite, to have taken an intense dislike to the 
poor Queen, who was not an admirer of his 
severe and hard manner, and he lost no 
opportunity of revenging himself. He was 
one of the infamous inquisitors who examined 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 149 

the royal children on the charges invented 
by Hebert, and one must regret that no 
worse fate befell him than exile when the 
Bourbons were restored. Although a cruel 
and vindictive caricature, there is enough in 
the hasty outline sketch David made at that 
moment to give one an idea of how the 
Queen appeared. She is described by eye- 
witnesses as being pale as death, with only 
a hectic flush at her cheek-bones, the eyes 
injected with blood, probably caused by so 
many sleepless nights and intense suffering. 
Only once during that long road to death 
did the Queen display any emotion. A little 
child held up by its mother in front of the 
Church of the Oratory kissed its little hand 
to the Queen, who burst into tears. Her own 



I50 LAST BAYS OF 

child, her little Dauphin, must have then been 
uppermost in her heart. 

Owing to the difficulty the Queen had 
to keep her place on the narrow plank on 
which she sat, her head seemed strained and 
rigid, but her eyes followed the crowd, and 
even seemed attracted by the tricolour flags 
that were displayed from out the windows 
and in the balconies. Some suppose that 
she had been told to look at a certain house, 
in which a priest not assermente would be 
placed, and from which he would give her his 
benediction. But this seems to me one of the 
legends that were invented by those anxious to 
make believe that the last offices of the Roman 
Church were, even in so distant a manner, ac- 
corded her. The different inscriptions on the 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 151 

buildings, too, attracted her attention. The 
oft-repeated " Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite," so 
veritably carried out by that Government, 
must have seemed strange to one who had 
known the real meaning of that lying phrase. 
On passing, the Palais Royal — now called 
" Palais Egalite " — arrests her attention. To 
please the mob, several halts were made, so 
as to enable the crowd to insult her. " Mes- 
salina," " Fredegonde," are the terms in which 
the street-viragos hail her. Before the Jaco- 
bin Club, which bore the inscription " Depot 
of Republican arms to destroy tyrants," a 
long halt was made, and the cries and howl- 
inffs of the mob rend the air. At the corner 
of the Rue Royale, near Robespierre's house, a 
triple rank of national guards were stationed. 



152 LAST DAYS OF 

At length, after an hour of this torment, 
the Place de la Revolution was reached, and 
with it the term of the Queen's sufferings. 
Passing between the noble buildings of the 
" Garde Meuble " and the Admiralty, the 
cart turned to the left, and when half across 
the Square the guillotine is reached. When 
Louis XVI. was executed, that Instrument 
stood between where now rises the Luxor 
obelisk and the Rue Royale ; but for the 
Queen the place has been changed, and the 
hideous narrow blood-coloured beams stand 
between that spot and the gardens of the 
Tuilerles In the centre. Where formerly had 
stood the equestrian statue of Louis XV. now 
stood a huge plaster monument of Liberty. 
Troops surround the guillotine, the crowd 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 53 

is dense all around, and even among the 
branches of the autumnal-tinted chestnut trees 
of the royal gardens are many people. 

With one last look at the great dome of 
the palace, and after a short prayer, the Queen 
rapidly mounted the scaffold steps; she does 
this without assistance, and with extraordinary 
firmness. 

She appears to have spoken but once — a 
few words of apology to Sanson, on whose 
foot she had trod. Even in death her natural 
courtesy could not desert her. She then, with 
a movement of her head, threw off her cap, 
and is prepared for the fatal stroke. 

A little after twelve, and her sufferings were 
at length finished. 



154 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



That night the following entry was written 
by the gravedigger Toly, belonging to the 
cemetery of the Madeleine and of the Ville 
d'Eveque : — 

For the bier of the Widow Capet, . 6 livres. 
For the grave and the gravediggers, . 25 „ 



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